La Mesure in Renaissance Music

You may remember a film from the early 1970s called Henry VIII & his Six Wives, starring Keith Mitchell, Donald Pleasance, and Charlotte Rampling; it was notable for its score, which not only featured authentic music of the period (nearly unheard-of at the time), but also was, according to David Munrow, “the first historical film in which the music has been scored entirely for historical instruments.

Le Jeune’s distinctive contribution to the French chanson marks him out as one of the genre’s essential figures. He is best known for having given musical voice to the concept of the vers mesure a l’antique. The pioneer of this poetic style, Antoine du Baif, sought to return to the simplicity of Greek verse with its clear rules of scansion. The Protestant Le Jeune responded with polyphonic settings in which melismas are abolished in favour of long or short notes of constant duration, corresponding to the strong/weak accentual patterns of the words. In his hands this seemingly daunting restriction is remarkably flexible, and other composers experimented with it, if only briefly (as in Lassus’s lovely Une puce).